Prince Al Waleed staked half his fortune on a struggling Citicorp
In January 1991 Citicorp, battered by property losses and Latin American debt, needed fresh capital. A Saudi prince agreed to put in 590 million dollars, roughly half of everything he had. Sandy Weill, who later ran the merged Citigroup, reckoned the move really saved the bank. It also made Al Waleed bin Talal famous.
Born in Jeddah on 7 March 1955, Al Waleed is a grandson of both Saudi Arabia's founding king, Abdulaziz, and Riad Al Solh, Lebanon's first prime minister. His parents split when he was seven and he grew up largely with his mother in Beirut, a restless boy who sometimes ran away and slept in unlocked cars. He studied business at Menlo College in California, finishing in two and a half years, and later took a master's at Syracuse in eleven months.
He came home in 1979 in the middle of an oil boom and set up shop in a four-room cabin in Riyadh, with 30,000 dollars from his father. That money lasted only months, so he borrowed 300,000 dollars from a bank. Foreign firms needed a local partner to win contracts, and instead of taking the usual fee he demanded a share of each project. His first big win came in 1982 alongside a South Korean builder, and he funnelled the proceeds into property and shares.
Once the boom faded he bought a weak Saudi bank in 1986 and merged it into a regional leader. Abroad, his method was to find famous names in trouble, study them and wait for the right price. By 1989 he was worth 1.4 billion dollars. The Citicorp bet, taken through a convertible security paying 11 percent, briefly lifted his holding to around 15 percent of the bank.
Hotels became a hallmark. He bought the George V in Paris in 1996 for 185 million dollars and spent another 120 million restoring it, and took stakes in Four Seasons, Fairmont, the Plaza and Euro Disney. Time magazine dubbed him the Arabian Warren Buffett, and in November 2017 Forbes ranked him seventh-richest in the world.
Source: Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud
